Students March at Univ. of Georgia to Protest Racist, Homophobic Facebook Messages

A post on the University of Georgia’s Black Affairs Council’s Facebook page led students at the university to stage a protest march in response on Friday afternoon.

The post on the student group’s page read, “Why can’t you dumb dirty n—–s stop stinking up the place? Let UGA be RIGHT for good WHITE Christian students.”

The university’s Equal Opportunity Office and school police say they are investigating the incident, along with similar Facebook and Twitter posts by the same person targeting the UGA LGBT Resource Center and Muslims. Police learned of the posts on Tuesday, said UGA Police Chief Jimmy Williamson, and they are reaching out to Facebook and Twitter administrators for help.

UGA vice president for public affairs Tom Jackson had seen the Facebook posts Thursday, but wouldn’t repeat the language in the post that wound up on the LGBT Resource Center Facebook page.

“Both are of a similar tone, using every bad word you can think of targeting a specific group,” he said.

UGA senior Caroline Bailey, president of the Black Affairs Council, emailed a screen capture of the offensive post to administrators in UGA’s Student Affairs Department. They forwarded it on the Equal Opportunity Office, the UGA office responsible for enforcing the university’s Non-Discrimination and Anti-Harassment Policy.

Bailey said she hopes to see some support from more than just the affected student groups at Friday’s march.

“We’re looking for participation from all people and races,” Bailey told the Athens Banner-Herald. “We want to protest those kinds of things and bring awareness that these things are still going on at the university, over 50 years after desegregation.”

UGA vice president and assistant vice president for student affairs, Victor Wilson and T.W. Cauthen, respectively, sent an email of support to Bailey and other students.

“Acts of this nature are deplorable and are a threat to the learning environment we seek to create at the University of Georgia,” the email noted. “Please know that we, along with the University of Georgia, are committed to addressing these kinds of acts and behaviors.”

The accounts are in the name of a student at the school, but the student, who visited the police department on Thursday, told UGA detectives someone else created the accounts in his name, Williamson said.

“At a university that harps on the value of diversity, unfortunately, the majority of my time has been marked by things that make us feel like an undesirable population,” she wrote in a letter calling for support in Friday’s march.